| OK. I�ve decided that I�d finally like to start doing commercial reviews. I�m just gonna watch every commercial during Game 5 of the Cubs-Braves series. I don�t know my objective, so it may seem a bit aimless. Commercial 1: Some kind of construction situation. They call in some guy on a Silverado to tow out a bulldozer. I don�t know how the guy in the bulldozer got into that mud pit, or what he was trying to do. Like a Rock. Commercial 2: Duracell commercial. Saving lives or exploring a world of hobbits. I like when they make these claims. "The rescue squad of blah blah blah chooses Duracell.". How did they figure this out? I�m sure there were no meetings in this rescue squad to decided which batteries to use. Billy-Joe went to the store, grabbed a pack of batteries, and saved some hikers. I bet they didn�t even always use Duracell. Duracell probably called and asked "Do you use Duracell?". Frankie, the guy too inept to rescue people is the guy on the phone. He says "yeah, sometimes". There you have it. Lives are at risk, and Duracell is the choice. Commercial 3: Dentyne Fire gum. While chewing it, your date at a cool jazz place will change to a date in a hot salsa place. I may be a square, but I prefer the jazz place, but that�s beside the point. Dentyne has these magical capabilities and they waste it in gum? And they use it to create salsa music? Show me a commercial with a guy dying. Show someone putting Dentyne into his mouth to revive him. Then I�ll buy it. Commercial 4: A lady who gets heartburn eating in a diner. The cook is extremely helpful. He knows so much about these antacids. It seems like everyone does, in every commercial. What�s better, Tums has calcium, which is apparently a huge concern of the diners. ----- Commercial 5: Bud Lite. A guy with a filthy room. A hot girl wants to come up and he rejects her. Then she says that she has Bud Lite. I love how beer commercial characters aren�t interested in anything except beer. Anyway, He cleans up his room and she comes up. He goes into the kitchen, she opens a closet door, and it explodes open like an accordion. He comes in and says something stupid. I don�t know how she survived. Commercial 6: Procrit. A sympathetic commercial about a survivor of Chemo. This is the first medical prescription commercial that I can remember the purpose of the drug being advertised. Usually, it�s something cryptic: "Ask your doctor about Vartek.", as a lady takes a breath of fresh air and continues her morning walk. Procrit. Maybe I�ll pay more attention to these when I�m sickly. Commercial 7: Nissan. Nothing out of the ordinary. Zoomed out camera shots, close-ups of the car on a windy road, a final shot of a spinning Nissan. Exciting. Commercial 8: Burger King. An advertisement of a new low-fat chicken sandwich. It looks pretty good. I thought it was a Subway commercial at first. I have to make up some stuff because Cathy was vacuuming, so I couldn�t hear. Normally, I might have asked her to stop for a minute. Unfortunately, the Redskins had just lost to the Eagles, so I�m not gonna push it. She might have gotten mad anyway, if I asked her to stop cleaning so I could hear a commercial. Maybe I should have said "Cathy- stop. Let me do that." Why do I always find the answer too late? Commercial 9: Dream Catcher. Out on DVD. Some stuff happened, and the vacuum was extremely noisy. Commercial 10: The Simpsons. Halloween episode. Wacky antics. I love the Simpsons. Commercial 11: World Series. Derek Jeter doing all kinds of stuff. I still can�t hear a thing. I like to hate all New York athletes, because they get so overhyped. ------ Commercial 12: Volkswagon SUV. This one is $51,000. A Touareg. I wonder what that means. I bet they took 3 words and spliced them together. Then they tried to pretend it was a German word. The homos. Commercial 13: Taco Bell Spicy Chicken Burrito. It�s really spicy. A guy feeds it to his venus fly-trap. Then the guys watch TV. Then the plant drinks the guy�s soda because of that spicy burrito. The guys only now look confused. They weren�t confused that the plant chewed a burrito. It�s this kind of commercial that makes me stupid. Commercial 14: Master Card. Program- $4. Snacks- $25. Soda- $3. Friday night�.no tv, dvds, video games- priceless. I agree and disagree. It�s good to take your family out for a fun night. It�s not that bad to watch a good movie though. It can be educational or a documentary or something. It can be a concert on DVD. Watching a movie isn�t necessarily a bad thing. Commercial 15: A monkey doing the "can you hear me now" thing with a banana. Everyone starts to notice when you set up the world�s best something or other. I think it�s a pretty successful campaign. Except that I don�t know which phone company does that one. Maybe I can deduce it. That guy that reminds me of Steve Young is with Sprint. The can-you-hear-me-now guy was in a commercial with him once, I think. It was a chilling moment, if it did happen. Maybe it�s Verizon. At least I know that if I want service anywhere, trust a phone company. --- Commercial 16: George Clooney, Catherine Zeta Jones. Intolerable Cruelty. There�s no way this movie isn�t recycled or something. The vacuum is on again, so maybe I missed some new key plot, but without sound, it�s the same as any Clooney movie. Or Jones movie. Or any movie, really. Commercial 17: I brake for old ladies, I brake for doughnuts, I brake for�.. Midas. The two girls that brake for boys: I didn�t even see the girl on the right the first few times I saw this commercial. I mean, I saw her, but I left the commercial wondering if she was hot. There�s testament for you theatre majors. People look at things the same way that they read, in our case left to right. There was also a guy who brakes for UFOs. I think they put that guy in there to make us feel better about ourselves. Commercial 18: Bank One Credit Card. Weird. The guy has an "I brake for Whales" shirt on. It�s funny, but that fact that it came on after the last one. OK, it�s not interesting but it�s weird. This is a commercial in which the cashier reads the sponsor on each person�s credit card and makes a cute remark. The remark is always cute in the same way morning people are cute. Commercial 19: Home Depot commercial. It�s about something�.I don�t know. The damn vacuum. This is turning out to be the least successful venture of my commercial-reviewing career. Commercial 20: Skin. A new show. Romeo and Juliet as a show I guess. A modern, corporate version. The thing that strikes me is the shot at the end, when they�re both hiding under sheets. These sheets are made of silk or cloth-glass or something very see through. Who do they think they�re hiding from? Maybe if someone walked in, the guy would run away with the sheet still on his head and pretend he�s a ghost. ----- Commercial 21-end: Well, I told Matt he could watch TV at 9. I thought I was going to go upstairs and continue this on my laptop. Unfortunately, I left my power-cord at school. Oh well. It ended early this time, and maybe it�s for the better. I�ve wasted a lot of time this weekend. Maybe I�d be better off not doing this. A last note- this is harder than I thought it�d be. It took the entire non-commercial time to fill in the gaps between my commercial-time notes. I need to be more mentally prepared next time. |